122 DR TRAILL ON A PERUVIAN MUSICAL INSTRUMENT 
gonies, the monuments, the hieroglyphics, and institutions of the people of Ame- 
rica and Asia.” 
It is impossible to consider the Mexican account of the Senpent-woman, To- 
nacacihua, or “ Woman of our Flesh,” the parent of mankind, with her fall from 
her state of pristine innocence and happiness; their traditions of a great inunda- 
tion, in which the human race perished, with the exception of a single family that 
escaped on a raft; their account of the building of a vast pyramid, which was 
intended to reach to the sky, and consequent dispersion of the sons of men, and 
the origin of different languages, caused by the anger of the gods, when they 
overthrew this monument of human presumption; without perceiving the proto- 
types of these traditions in the sacred writings of the Hebrews. 
The Mexican cosmogony notes jive epochs of the world; like the people of 
Thibet, and the Tatar tribes who have retained the ancient religion of the Llama. 
The first is the age of earth ; the second that of jive; the third the age of wind or 
air ; the fourth that of water; we live in the fifth epoch. It was in the end of 
the fourth age that the deluge took place, and that a single family was preserved 
to repeople the earth. As might be expected, Coxcox (the Mexican Noah) is 
represented as the immediate ancestor of the inhabitants of that country. In the 
first four epochs we may trace the four ages of classical antiquity, with the Tatar 
addition of a fifth. Like the Chinese and Indians, the Mexicans supposed an 
enormous duration to our earth in all its cataclysms. The Mexican legends ex- 
tended the age of the world to upwards of 20,000 years. 
In the astronomical cycles of some of the American nations, we find strong 
analogies with the systems of the inhabitants of Thibet, and the various tribes of 
the Mantscheou Tatars. The Mexican division of the year into 365 days, distri- 
buted into 18 months, of 20 days each; the annual intercalation of five days to 
complete the year, and still more their curious cycle of 52 years, and great cycle 
of 104 years, in which they intercalated 25 days, to bring the commencement of 
the next cycle again to correspond with the winter solstice, shew so exact a deter- 
mination of the true length of the year, that the celebrated Lartace is of opinion 
it could not have originated among a people in so rude a state of society as the 
Mexicans at their discovery by the Spaniards. The intercalation “ of 25 days in 
104 years,” says he, “supposes a more exact determination of the tropical year than 
that of Hrerarcuus, and, what is very remarkable, almost equal to the year of 
the astronomers of Al-Mamon. When we consider the difficulty of attaining so 
exact a determination, we are led to believe that it is not the work of the Mexi- 
cans, and that it reached them from the Old Continent.” 
The vast pyramidal temples, accurately placed to the cardinal points, and 
constructed, as at Cholula, of swx-dried bricks, with interposed layers of clay; 
and occasionally, as at Papantla, with their successive stages neatly covered with 
hewn stone, sculptured with hieroglyphics, reminded us of the structures of the 

